I’ve been thinking about tinkering something again. A nice little game to work on from scratch. I think it’s a chance for me to get a whole experience of development and publishing. I hope I can delve more about game development from it. So, hey, why not? Let’s build something for fun again!

The Game

I’d like to make a game about sliding puzzle game. But why sliding puzzle game? It’s a famous and simple game. The game is not unique in mechanic. Only pushing the blocks to empty spot. By maintaining this simplicity I can explore more about juiciness and polishing stuffs. And of course, get things done. Heehee. *looking through the pile of abandoned projects*

The Works

I have broken down some of the steps for this game development. It’s a combination of research, development, and publishing in one. Check this out

Research on coding stuffs:

Draw picture part on tiles

Move tiles

Checking win and lose

Scoring

Timer

Screens

Main Menu

Winning Screen / Losing Screen

Login Google Play Games

Google Play Games Score

Load picture from gallery

Google Play Achievement

AdMob

Content building:

Graphic asset creation

Music asset creation

Achievements

Polishing and juiciness

Sounds

Splash screen, icons, and publishing

Play store upload

Quality Assurance:

Testing and Debugging

Publishing

Social media and stuffs

That’s quite a lot of thing to do. About 20 steps (and I expect more to come). But because it’s not deadlined project and my private “level up” to practice my development skill, I’ll give it a time.

Huh, but why I smell unfinished job if I say so? Let’s build the milestone then.

November – Pre-Alpha. The game is minimum playable.

December – Alpha. The game has load picture functionality, juiciness added.

January – Closed Beta. Music and assets added. Everything tested out.

February – Open Beta. Ads running. The login works. Everything should be fine. Expecting bugs.

March – Version 1.

….

That was the ideal timing. But you know, it’s a side project. Because it’s “side”, so… I work it in my “side” time.

The Tools

It’s a game making, and we need something to scribble it. These are the tools I’d like to use

LibGDX for the game framework. Why? It’s a light game framework (unlike Unity, which is an engine). I also wanted to explore the game development a bit lower level. It helped me to learn how the game application works. In Unity almost everything is magically happened, I blinded by simplicity of it.

Android Studio for the editor. I think it’s a fully fledged IDE for java development specifically for the Android (duh, it’s called Android Studio for something)

Inkscape

Music? Err… Search the Free Non Royalty music, I guess.

The Time

I expect this game will be finished in 4 or 8 months. It will cost about $3000 or more. Lol.

We have a problem finding a simple plugin for cinematic event. We only want something that has timeline and can throw any script to do something to the game world.

Yesterday when I searched about “extending Unity’s timeline” I tripped on something called Animator. A plugin for cinematic in Unity. It’s no longer actively develop, but someone make a branch of it and called it MateAnimator. Go grab it! https://github.com/ddionisio/MateAnimator